Summary
Self-driving technology startup Wayve has launched a supervised robotaxi service in London through the Uber app, marking a significant milestone in the global commercialization of autonomous ride-hailing. Wayve CEO Alex Kendall described London as among the hardest places in the world to deploy autonomous vehicles — a 2,000-year-old city with narrow roads and dense pedestrians — making the launch a meaningful technical proof point for the company’s end-to-end AI driver architecture.
The current service operates with safety operators in the vehicle. Kendall outlined a three-step path to fully driverless operation: transitioning to a scalable vehicle platform built in mass production by automakers like Nissan and Stellantis (no retrofits), validating safety metrics for driverless conditions, and securing a driverless permit from UK regulators under a framework that includes a 2024 UK act and UN technical regulations adopted by the UK, Europe, and Japan. Wayve plans to expand to Tokyo by year-end and has agreed with Uber on a rollout across 10 additional cities globally, including the United States.
Kendall also highlighted Wayve’s broader technical approach — a single neural network scaling from consumer vehicles to robotaxis, including vision language action models and world models for robotics. The company has raised nearly $3 billion to date and recently completed a second employee liquidity round. London is one of Uber’s five largest markets by revenue, making it a strategically significant launch market.
📺 Source: Bloomberg Tech · Published September 03, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
